JG's Pages for Poets  ( and the occasional prose)

Page No S12

SHORT BACK AND SIDES

BY

BILL MELROSE

I had my hair cut by a woman yesterday.  No, I’m not being sexist or chauvinistic.  It’s just that I’ve always been very careful about who cuts my hair.  It’s not that I go in for way-out styles or highlighting or any of that rubbish.  All I want is a short back and sides.  It’s the actual hairdresser I worry about.   You can never be really sure about a person who calls himself Vivyan with a ‘y’, or Trevor.   I’ve been going for years to Joe Connolly in Garston.  You can’t go wrong if the barber’s name is Joe.  Two pounds fifty for the senior citizen as long as you don’t go on a Saturday.

So there I am reading the Daily Sport and listening to Radio City when this woman comes from the back of the shop and herds me into the vacant chair.  I look at her through the mirror.  She’s a blonde in a white tunic, swollen at the chest and pinched at the waist, with scissors and comb arching out of her top pocket.  Trousers are black and slim fitting, but I can’t quite see the ankles.  If Joe is going up market, I am thinking to myself, he might at least have swept up the hair that’s lying like a shaggy mat on the lino.

            “Hi,” she says, “I’m Hazel.”

I’m not into this first name stuff with perfect strangers.  I grunt and ask for the short back and sides.  There’s nowhere else to cut anyway.  She leans over me to get the sheet under my chin and the smell is definitely not Joe’s mixture of Tetley and tobacco.  It reminds me of the duty free perfume trolley that comes after the drinks trolley that stop you from going to the toilet at the rear of the plane.  She sticks the tissue inside my collar and the fingers on the back of my neck feel long and soft and seem to reach down to the middle of my shoulder blades.  I think I’m getting to know her quite quickly and I sit back and wait for Hazel to tell me how badly she thought the team played last Saturday.

But she doesn’t.  Instead, she tells me she’s an air-hostess, or was an air-hostess, and that she’s just been made redundant from British Airways.  No wonder I’d been thinking about trolleys.

            “I saw it coming,” she says.  “The writing was on the wall when that fool Ayling started painting the tailfins in ethnic colours and upset Maggie.  I’ve been doing my NVQs at night class.  Just got my certificates.  I’m getting work experience with Joe.”

            “You couldn’t have chosen a nicer fellow.” 

I’ve been going to Joe since the days he used to shrivel up the hair ends with a lighted taper to prevent the goodness seeping out.

            “I know, but I’m afraid I’m a bit disaster prone whenever I start on a job.  I remember my first time on a Viscount.”

I lean forward in the chair, anticipating a story of abandonment by the dastardly aristocrat and the mirror starts to steam up. 

            “You know, that four-engined turbo prop.”

“Oh, that Viscount.”

I vaguely remember it flying round in the fifties and sixties.  Anyway, it was shortly after they phased out the Sopwith Camel.  I look at Hazel in a new light to see if the anti-wrinkle Botox injections are visible.

            “It had lovely big windows that went right down to the floor.”

“I suppose they gave you a much better view of the wing shaking.”

            “We used to carry out the drinks on a great big wooden tray.  I had twenty-four glasses of orange squash on my first flight when I tripped and they all went over this man with a bald head.  Don’t take offence, but doing your hair reminded me of him.  I’m dead clumsy, really.  Do you want me to trim these sideboards with the razor?”

I look at Joe’s décor.  It is more saloon than salon.  Hardboard panels stained in dark oak, photos of Lonsdale Belt holders in the thirties and forties, and open cut-throat razors hooked over nails looking like crossbones without the skulls.  I wonder what might have happened to the skulls and then I think what the hell, this conversation is worth the odd nick or two and I decide to have a shave as well.

“Then there was that time in a BAC 111 when we hit some turbulence,” says Hazel as she slops on the lather.

I actually remember the BAC 111, the short to medium haul flagship of British European Airways with twin rear mounted Rolls Royce jet engines.

            “We were on the Amsterdam run and an elderly woman in one of the rear seats was sick.  Luckily she managed to use the sick bag.  I tied it up and put it in the bin in our little cubbyhole at the front of the plane.  Her seat light kept flashing and I went back down in case she was being sick again.  But she told me that she’d lost her teeth.”

            “Charming.”

            “So I put on a pair of rubber gloves and fiddled about in the bag and I found the teeth.  I rinsed them and took them down the plane to her.  I’d just got back when her light went on again.  What’s the trouble this time? I asked her.”

            “These teeth,” she said, “they don’t fit.  I don’t think they’re mine.”

I tell Hazel that I don’t believe her and she says it’s the God’s honest truth and are these towels too hot on my face.

Hazel takes off the sheet and as she brushes my collar I find myself looking forward to the next haircut.  I don’t care if I never find out why the team aren’t scoring goals.  I want to hear the full story of that long haul trip to South Africa with the awful woman with a small baby in first class.  From what I’ve heard so far, the final insult is that this woman insists that Hazel should change the baby.  Hazel says she goes back to economy and borrows a black baby and hands it to the woman.  

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